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Riddles Of Belief...and Love: A Story (2010)

by Lin Zhe(Favorite Author)

3.31 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1608442845 (ISBN13: 9781608442843)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Dog Ear Publishing

review 1: Even being nearly 700 pages, this book seems incomplete. Maybe it's the translation, maybe it's the structure (time jumping is so hard to execute well), or maybe the author's goal was to leave the modern story feeling incomplete to portray the continual social and cultural evolution of China. Whatever it was, I finished feeling somewhat dissatisfied.There were vignettes I loved; long passages that left me bored; memorably developed secondary characters; and a cast of characters that required, in my opinion, a front-plate or appendix with family trees to keep them straight.All in all, the meandering and obfuscating structure is somewhat redeemed by moments that evoke just how tumultuous, confusing, aspiring, and restricting modern China's development has ... morebeen.
review 2: I don't know whether to blame the author or the translator for this big dull dud. I had the impression that Chinese was an expressive language given to poetry and flights of fancy, so how is it that the word "really" shows up so often in the English translation? Beautiful language can sometimes save an uninspiring story (see Dyachenko's The Scar, also a wonderful example of how to translate into English and keep the poetry), but I'm not sure a good story can save dreadful writing. In this case, I found the modern-day narrator so unlikeable and offputting I didn't stick around very long to find out. less

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